chronicled & illustrated

You know what that is, don’t you?

Shameless Padding.

I resorted to it today in my writing. Man-oh-man, am I ever distracted. I am really feeling the pull of everything else in my life! And right when I was on such a roll!

Is that a coincidence? Maybe not. Maybe it’s self-sabotage. Or maybe I’m just simply tired of writing every day.

The good news is that the novel itself doesn’t seem to be the problem. I like the story and it’s unfolded nicely.

But today I was attempting to write what feels like a crucial scene. It’s also a scene that I didn’t know was going to happen in this way, so I haven’t had a lot of time to think it through. As I was writing, I started wondering if I wasn’t getting off track. Maybe the characters should have come to this place by a different method. If that would work better in the long run, why am I, I wondered, wasting time writing something that I KNOW is going to have to be rewritten.

My solution to this problem was to write what I felt I did know and then move right on into Shameless Padding. I wrote the last page and a half as notes to myself about how I thought it might work better. AND I counted those words. You better believe I did. It was good. I think having done that will move things along better tomorrow and the next day. That’s why it’s shameless.

Of course, I’ll make certain that my word count by the end of November is well above the 300+ words so my padding or my shamelessness won’t show!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under fiction, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.